Data-driven Improvement Effort Leads to Results in Oak Park

by Joan Richardson
RESULTS - September 1997

Examples of math problems that children have mastered mark a hallway wall of Key Elementary School in Oak Park, Mich. "A" papers march their way down the "Brag Line.'' Full-size outlines of human bodies with body parts labeled, colored, and stuck in the right spots adorn another wall.

Evidence of children who are succeeding at their efforts to learn is everywhere in this school.

In five years, this suburban Detroit district has gone from a cellar-dweller on Michigan's mandatory achievement tests to being recognized as one of the state's most improved districts. Oak Park now can brag about achievement scores as good as many nearby suburban districts and better than some.

Oak Park has not made its mark by enabling some schools to shine and move ahead while others stagnate and fall behind. Instead, Oak Park has a systemwide school improvement effort that focuses on student achievement by identifying the district's vision, mission, and goals; aligning curriculum with state objectives; and engaging teachers in reflection, planning, and staff development.

"We're not superstars in this district. We don't have big names. What this is all about is helping ordinary people do extraordinary things,'' said Gary Marx, director of student performance analysis.

Oak Park's turnaround began five years ago when the district began working with John Porter, a highly-respected Michigan educator who heads the Institute of School Reform at Eastern Michigan Univ.

The cornerstone of Porter's improvement plan has teachers intensively examine student achievement data and adapt their teaching strategies to reach struggling students. "School reform should be driven by generation of the evidence. You should not even begin the school year until you know the results of your work from the preceding year," Porter said.

Oak Park's improvement process began by including the community in identifying 37 success indicators including school readiness; standardized test performance; grade point average; student and employee attendance; dropout and retention rates; social skills; parent participation; and fiscal responsibility.

Baseline measures of those indicators found the district ranked "excellent'' in only one category and "high need'' in 22 others.

Administrators laid out a strategic plan that included assigning Marx full-time to oversee the improvement process.

The next step involved developing an automated information system to generate monthly data for each indicator. Teachers and administrators were trained to collect and analyze the information. School groups meet monthly to refine their improvement plans.

"Once you teach them how to analyze the data, then they can become productive team members and help you search for solutions,'' Marx said.

As this intensive examination went on, teachers learned to compare their classroom grading against the Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP), the state's mandatory academic exams. "Once we helped teachers see the discrepancy between how they were grading kids and how they were doing on the MEAP, they began to see the problems,'' Marx said.

All of this effort, however, would fall apart if schools and classroom teachers didn't understand and embrace the same goals being promoted at the district level.

Key Elementary School teacher Robert Graham has taken the district's data focus so seriously that he's devised techniques to help him track his 30 third graders.

Each Friday, Graham's students identify learning objectives in math and reading for the next week. For example, a child might set a goal of learning their time tables for nines that week. By the next Friday, Graham will assess whether they've reached their goals. If they haven't, students can chose the same goal for the next week.

"It makes them more aware of the objectives that are there,'' said Graham who's been teaching for five years. "Part of the problem is that the older kids don't understand what the objectives are. They don't understand what the curriculum is. This lets them know that,'' he said.

Before he finalizes his lesson plans each week, Graham goes over the collected data on his students to note where his students stand in the school and district objectives for the year. Then, he adjust his teaching plans accordingly.

To support classroom changes, Oak Park reallocated funds to create jobs for instructional specialists in the critical MEAP areas of science, mathematics, and language arts. The specialists coordinate curriculum, instruction, and staff development.

"It was crazy for us to ever believe we could increase MEAP scores or learning in those areas when we didn't have anyone who was responsible for that and that alone,'' Marx said.

By paying closer attention to data from the MEAP and other assessments, building principals could quickly identify struggling teachers and help them improve.

Teachers soon realized that parents needed better information about learning goals. So, after teachers identified outcomes, a parent-teacher team wrote easy-to-read curriculum outcome guides for each grade and each subject. Parents can check off their children's progress throughout the year.

By summer 1996, Oak Park had enough momentum to offer an intensive three-week summer staff development institute to interested elementary school teachers. Seventy-six percent of the staff volunteered for day-long sessions that focused on strategies to help students reach their goals for math, science, and language arts.

Working in grade-level teams convinced teachers they needed to continue meeting during the school year. With funding from the C.S. Mott Foundation, Oak Park paid teachers to attend monthly districtwide grade-level meetings after school. Many teachers also volunteered additional time to create smaller grade-level teams at their schools.

During summer 1997, elementary school teachers once again went back to school for an intensive institute. This time, teachers spent their mornings learning strategies that would be most effective with struggling students. Then, each afternoon, they applied those lessons as they taught summer school to the district's neediest students. The next morning, they share with each other what they had learned from applying their own lessons of the previous day.

For Marx, repeated attention to the data has been crucial. Teachers and administrators have learned to focus on patterns and to adapt their work accordingly.

"What I realized from all of this is that we had it all right there all along. We just didn't know how to pull it all together so it would make a difference for kids," Marx said.

For more information about Oak Park's achievement, contact Gary Marx, Oak Park School District, 13900 Granzon, Oak Park, MI 48237-2091, 248-433-5709 or fax 248-433-5650.